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It’s No Beijing, But Hong Kong Is Choking, Too

HONG KONG — For the business, political and media glitterati assembled in the rarefied Alpine atmosphere of Davos, air pollution has probably not been terribly high on the agenda.

Not so in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other mainland Chinese cities: As my colleague Sharon LaFraniere recently reported, China’s air pollution levels have started to seriously worry — and anger — many of the country’s 1.3 billion citizens. Faced with an Internet-led brush fire of criticism for failing to track the levels of extra-fine particles in the air, the Chinese government decreed earlier this month that there would be more monitoring and, ahem, transparency on the issue.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Hong Kong quickly announced it would update its own air-quality objectives by 2014. (Meanwhile, the current standards are 25 years old and widely criticized as being woefully out of date).

There are no directly comparable statistics, but by Beijing’s standards, Hong Kong’s air is probably sparkling clean. At least Hong Kong has not had to cancel airline flights because of smog-induced visibility problems.

But Hong Kong prides itself as being an international center of trade and finance — proclaiming itself no less than “Asia’s World City” — and so for better or worse, it has to measure itself against other international urban titans.

On the air front, Hong Kong does not stack up well, and clean-air campaigners here have been pressing home the point that pollution is not only bad for people’s physical health, but also for the city’s other lifeblood: business.

In a survey of companies operating in Hong Kong conducted by the office-space provider Regus last year, three-quarters of respondents said the city’s air quality was making it harder for them to attract and retain employees from abroad.

The United States Chamber of Commerce likewise has reported that U.S. companies in Hong Kong have had difficulties attracting or keeping staff.

Doctors and scientists have warned repeatedly of the threat to public health. A new study by Hong Kong University and Civic Exchange, an independent research group, found an average of 3,200 deaths attributable to air pollution each year.

And so the Hong Kong government’s recent pledge to do revise its air-quality objectives has been widely criticized as too little, too late.

Fergus O’Rorke, the founder of the Web site CleanBiz Asia, declared himself “flabbergasted” that progress has been such a long time coming. And an editorial in the South China Morning Post, the city’s main English-language daily, concluded in unusually direct language that, “Our government is failing us.”

Mike Kilburn, head of environmental strategy at Civic Exchange, said that city officials had been “dithering” and “fudging the issue,” and that they have “forfeited Hong Kong’s position as the pacesetter for introducing tougher air quality standards in China.”

A snapshot measurement taken last week underlines the point: Despite reduced industrial activity in neighboring China (where many businesses were shut for the Lunar New Year celebrations), pollution in the main business district of Hong Kong was “high,” according to a real-time index published by the environment department.

Indeed, pollution levels in the downtown are have topped 100 (classified as ‘‘very high’’) on eight of the first 25 days this year, according to the Clean Air Network, a clean-air campaign group.